Last week, we learned that Donald Trump’s coal-loving administration was set to release a proposal that would allow coal-burning plants to flood the planet with greenhouse gas emissions, raising a giant middle finger to the killjoy tree-huggers who insist on protecting the environment and human health through silly little things like government regulations. Whereas Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan would have caused a shift toward less-dirty energy sources like wind, natural gas, and solar, the White House’s plan would prop up coal plants by giving states free rein to come up with their own rules, or letting them petition to opt out of regulations altogether. On Tuesday, the administration officially unveiled the proposal, and as it turns out, it’s not as bad as everyone feared—it’s much, much worse, if one considers the deaths of 1,400 Americans and the hastened demise of the planet to be “worse.”

The New York Times [reports] that, buried within 289 pages of technical analysis, the Environmental Protection Agency casually notes that under the scenario individual states are most likely to follow in order to comply with Trump’s hilariously titled “Affordable Clean Energy rule,” between 470 and 1,400 premature deaths will occur each year by 2030 due to “increased rates of microscopic airborne particulates known as PM 2.5.” On the flip side, Obama’s Clean Power Plan was expected to prevent between 1,500 and 3,600 premature deaths annually by 2030, but that guy’s a law-flouting Commie, so screw him. In addition, the Trump administration’s own analysis concludes that its plan would cause 48,000 new cases of “exacerbated asthma” and a minimum of 21,000 missed school days a year by 2030 due to ozone-related illnesses. By contrast, the plan it is replacing would have resulted in a significant drop in new instances of asthma and 180,000 fewer missed school days annually.

But breathing, going to school, and a normal life-expectancy are obviously for losers, which is presumably why William Wehrum, the acting administrator of the E.P.A.’s Office of Air and Radiation, simply referred to the plan’s downsides as “collateral effects” in a comment to the Times; he also said that the administration has “aggressive programs in place that directly target emissions of those pollutants.” (Incidentally, Wehrum spent much of the past 10 years working to destroy air-pollution rules as a lawyer representing—wait for it—coal-burning power plants, chemical manufacturers, oil drillers, and refineries. He was able to so seamlessly transition to weakening air-pollutant rules from within the E.P.A. thanks to “a quirk in federal ethics rules [that] limit the activities of officials who join the government from industry [but are] less restrictive for lawyers than for officials who had worked as registered lobbyists.”)

Speaking of premature deaths, Trump is apparently super concerned about them—not when they happen to humans, of course, but to birds, whose early demise he vastly overestimated last night in a characteristically crazy, off-the-rails speech decrying wind turbines and other forms of energy that both cost and pollute less than coal. Quoth the man who is somehow the president of the United States:

You can blow up a pipeline, you can blow up the windmills. You know, the wind wheels [mimics windmill noise, mimes shooting gun], “Bing!” That’s the end of that one. If the birds don’t kill it first. The birds could kill it first. They kill so many birds. You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field, the birds. But uh, you know, that’s what they were going to, they were going to windmills. And you know, don’t worry about wind, when the wind doesn’t blow, I said, “What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?” Well, then we have a problem. O.K. good. They were putting him in areas where they didn’t have much wind, too. And it’s a subsidary [sic]—you need subsidy for windmills. You need subsidy. Who wants to have energy where you need subsidy? So, uh, the coal is doing great.

Really, what else is there to add?

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Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former fixer, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to breaking campaign finance laws and other charges. He made the extraordinary admission that he arranged payments to two women “at the direction of the candidate,” referring to Mr. Trump, to secure their silence about affairs they said they had with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen told a judge in United States District Court in Manhattan that payments were “for the principal purpose of influencing the election” for president in 2016.

In addition, the president’s former personal attorney pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank fraud and tax evasion. While his plea agreement does not include a call for Cohen to cooperate with Manhattan federal prosecutors, the Times notes that it “does not preclude him from providing information to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining the Trump campaign’s possible involvement in Russia’s interference in . . . 2016.” Given that he’s all but signaled he’s ready and willing to tell the special counsel everything he knows, one assumes Cohen will probably be helping Mueller in any way he can. One can also expect the Twitter rant about Cohen being a “sad!” “lowlife!” “liar!” to commence in 3 . . . 2 . . .

And other Trump inner-circle legal news . . .

Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, was found guilty of five counts of tax fraud, one count of failure to report a foreign bank account, and two counts of bank fraud. Next month, Manafort will be back in court for another trial based on allegations of money laundering, foreign lobbying, and lying to the F.B.I., for which prosecutors say they have “well over 1,000” exhibits. All the best people, indeed!

The publisher of a Web site that serves as a platform for white nationalism was a guest last weekend at the home of President Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow.

Peter Brimelow attended the gathering, a birthday bash for Kudlow, one day after a White House speechwriter was dismissed in the wake of revelations that he had spoken alongside Brimelow on a 2016 panel.

Brimelow, 70, was once a well-connected figure in mainstream conservative circles, writing for Dow Jones and National Review. But over the past two decades, he has become a zealous promoter of white-identity politics on Vdare.com, the anti-immigration website that he founded in 1999.

According to Kudlow, he was totally unaware of Brimelow’s views, despite knowing the guy “forever” and having had him at “my dinner parties for years.” (The National Economic Council director says such topics simply never came up in conversation.) Brimelow declined The Washington Post’s request to be interviewed over the phone, and did not immediately respond to questions that were e-mailed to him.

Elsewhere!

Start-ups Fear That Trump's Tariffs Will Stifle the Next Apple (Bloomberg)